I'll get a team. It's Fatty Harps, it's Craig Athney Harper, It's the Youth Project. It's Easter Monday. I feel like I should be more religious and spiritual than I currently am. But in the thriving metropolis of Melbourne, it's nine thirty five am and a lot of you are out and about. It's a public holiday in Melbourne. It's very quiet in
the thriving metropolis that I lived. This morning. I was up walking around suburban suburban Hampton like the ninja that I am, and there wasn't another human to be seen, just me and the footpath or the sidewalk, as my guest would call it. And speaking of my guest, Hi, buddy, welcome back to the show.
No good to see you, Craig. Guess happy Easter is in order?
Yeah, yeah, you said that, and I'm with you. You're not a particularly eastery family. It's just a kind of a is it a I imagine it's a long weekend over there. Do you call them public holidays? Is that's what it's called or something else?
Yeah? Pretty much. And a lot of things are closed today, even some of the bigger stores. That was kind of a surprise, But it's nice to see that they are giving their employees time with their families and you know, a spiritual outlet to go celebrate Easter, or if they don't celebrate such a thing, just to have a nice, pleasant day off. It was gorgeous weather today, so that helped a lot too.
What's your I know we're going to talk about something other than this today, but before we open that door, what's the doctor bill? Off switch? Like? Do you I don't. You don't seem like someone who gets overly stressed, but I could be wrong, But where do you? Where do you kind of chill out? And how do you turn off?
Well? I have a switch on the back of my neck right here. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually a dial, so you can like turn it down and I'll get real mellow, turn it up and yeah, I'll just go. But you mean, like, how do I chill out? What do I do for to react? Yeah?
Yeah? Yeah, Like do you well, one, do you get anxious? Do you get stressed or not so much?
Oh? I used to when I was younger that that was you know, science. Being a scientist is a pretty stressful career, especially in the States, when you have you know, your currency in life, your currency in your job is generating papers and grant research funding and then being productive on that. And sometimes science isn't productive because your hypotheses are just bad guesses, or they could have been good guesses,
but the data surprises you. So you have to run this constant treadmill of trying to keep up and being really super productive. And you know, that's that wears on you after a while, and you have you know, you're a manager of a lab. So if you don't get grant funding, you have to tell all those people, sometimes students, sorry, we can't keep the lights on. You know, we're gonna have to shut down, or at least close down temporarily. So that's that's incredibly stressful.
Yeah, people wouldn't think of that dumb in some way, but a lot of people wouldn't even think that that's a thing, like you've, No, they don't.
They take it for granted that scientists have these guaranteed jobs. But even with tenure, if you are not productive and generating research funding, there are mechanisms now in place that can you know, either reduce your salary or even get you dismissed from the university.
That kind of makes the idea of tenure redundant, doesn't it.
Yeah, I mean the definition has certainly been eroded over time, and that's because there are some bad apples in the bunch. There are some that take advantage of the process. You know, once they get tenure, they slack off and you know, don't pull their own weight. So I can see the incentive, you know, for cracking down on it. But the real purpose of tenure is also to provide academic freedom. It gives you job security so that if you say or
research something controversial, your career is protected. And that serves everyone because you know, it allows truth seekers to do their thing. So, you know, I respect the tenure process. I think it's important it should be maintained. But then again, on the flip side, you do have people who take advantage of it.
It must be hard at the level that you're at, and then the kind of the sphere that you play in where you know, like you're still a human, you're still emotional, you still have certain ideas that will work out and won't work out. I don't mean this so much with you personally, but I feel like some of the people that I talk to, their identity is very much intertwined with how right they are in their thinking, like this, this is the way this particular thing works,
and that's that's it. Like I'm unequivocally right about this, so therefore any other data is just noise and where right, you're wrong. You know, I think that like the idea of science being this totally objective, pure, unimpacted by human folly is it's a good idea. But in the real world, scientists are all humans. Scientists have all got to pay
the bills. Scientists have all got bias and flaws and emotions, and so in the middle of all of that, Yeah, it's trying to navigate the complexity of being a human producing this stuff that is influent that is not influenced by my humanity. That's a tricky road.
It is, and it takes a certain personality. It takes someone who has a great deal of intellectual curiosity and an equal amount of humility, because a lot of your edge cada guesses are going to be wrong.
You know.
Nature is very hard to figure out and it's full surprises. So you just have to develop this thick skin and this you have to learn to reframe when things don't conform to your hypothesis. You have to couch that as interesting and compelling, because odds are everyone is thinking the.
Way you did.
We all expected the same thing. But when you find out something different, that could be a really profound discovery down the road because no one's really thinking about it. So you just have to learn how to reframe some of these perceived setbacks.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm not a particularly academic academic, as you know, but me doing about I don't know, three or four months away from the finish line. I think writing stuff, submitting pipers for publication, all that stuff at the moment, right, But I've changed not complete change of direction, but slight shift in direction and had to rethink, as you would understand. Also, psychology is a very messy field. I think it's a
very imprecise science. Shout out to all the psychologists and the psychology researchers and neuropsychology researchers, but it's a very I think it's a very messy kind of a minefield of you know, trying to find truth and absolutes. But yes, so many of the things that I thought would work out a certain way, more than half didn't. And I've had to go all right, well what does that mean? Like I thought I was going to come, I was
going to figure out. So my main thing, I think you remember, but is around this thing called meta accuracy, which is trying to understand how other people perceive and experience you. And my thing was looking at could we train it, could we teach it? Is it a skill? Is that a trait? Can we measure it? All of
these things are still pretty much unanswerable. Like even in the even when you say, well, let's look at all the research on how the different people, the different researchers and you know, teams that across different contexts and fields and have measured meta accuracy, there's no consensus. Like it's like there's not well, look we've done all this and here's the best protocol, Like there isn't one. And you're like, oh, I'm going to spend five and a half years and
really not add a lot to the pool. You know, but it's great, it's you know, you it. You know, it's another grain of sand in the beach of knowledge or drop of water in the ocean of knowledge. But it's very much a drop of water. That's it.
That's that's one of the things I actually enjoy about science, even though the piece of the puzzle you might be traying to fiddle with is incredibly small in the grand scheme of things, you know, because there's only so many hours in a day and science is hard and so on.
But it's still extremely rewarding knowing that you had a hand in placing one small bit of the puzzle into place, you know, or at least telling someone that, hey, that puzzle piece doesn't belong there after all, that's valuable too. And just to appreciate, you know, you get the sense of all when you're involved in science and you see things from I think a different perspective, and how incredibly complex the world really is. Everything from you know, our
bodies to psychology, the mind, to outer space. I mean, everything is just so much more complicated than we appreciate. And our puny, little stone age brains don't want to go there. You know. They were like really simple, black and white solutions, and that's just not how the world works in most cases.
Now.
Me, I find that thrilling because that means there's just an endless, you know, list of questions we can go out there and address. Roll up our sleeves do the experiments. You know, I think it's a really wonderful thing that humans invented something like the scientific method, because, as you alluded to earlier psychology being messy, at least now as opposed to when the field was in its infancy, there are efforts to apply real scientific metrics to these ideas,
and you know, to reproduce them too. There's a strong case to get all these studies reproduced so that they can be verified independently, and that's a really important step in science. What we have to realize is that we're trying to get to the truth. We're trying to discover how reality actually functions. And that's not an easy thing to do because we come at it with all of our built in human biases, our brain, heuristics, and you know,
different ways of looking at things. But if you know, science remains our best tool that we've ever invented, anyone can do it. So that's important because if you outline an experiment and discover X, you really get confidence that it's true. If someone else in the world can do the same thing and reach the same conclusion, you know, that's that's really good evidence that you're closer to the truth than you originally were.
Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. The other thing I think about, too, is like when we talk about the truth, the like capital T the truth, then you go into some kind of areas of uh, you know, research, where you go, well, look, for some people, this protocol is optimal, and for some people it's going
to kill them. You know. It's like me coming my background is xise science, right, so I go, well, this program is great for doctor Bill based on doctor Bill, you know, based on his chronological biological age, his current state, his injuries, he's medical issues, he's you know, his lifestyle, he's da da da da da, his goals, he's all
of these things. Based on all of that, I design an exercise program for you, which, for the bloke that you sit next to at work, would be the worst program, even though it's an identical protocol and you're both sixty year old males or whatever it is, right, I don't know how old you are.
But yeah, he's sixty yet, but sorry, fifty.
Five year old male. You know what I mean. It's you know, it's like it's that's the thing, like I when I was twenty years old, I could drink a glass of milk. In fact, I drank lots of milk because I grew up in the country. And now, because I guess my body produces less lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, I can't drink hardly any milk. So what worked for me at twenty doesn't work for me at sixty, you know. And I might eat a handful of peanuts and I have an anaphylactic reaction and fall
on the ground. And you have a handful of peanuts and go, they were great. I'm going to have more, you know. So even amongst all of the I guess the general accepted truths and principles, there's this individual variability of how people how different people will respond to the exact SIME protocol or stimuli.
Yeah, and you actually with that statement, Craig, you came full circle with how I like to wind down and blow off stress. I go out for a run. So I just we have this wonderful network of trails very close to our house. I go out there, I take my tunes and just run for an hour or something like that. And that to me is one of the greatest stress relievers and it's also a wonderful idea generator.
So you know, if ever I get stuck intellectually on a scientific problem or I have writer's block, going out for a run almost always gets me over that hurdle. Yeah, and that might sound counterintuitive to a lot of people. How do you relax? Well, I go out for a run.
But that's but that I mean, that's my point. And like one of the things, like I grew up, as I said, in the country, and part of that was riding motorbikes. And so from when I was ten until now, I've ridden motorbikes. And you know, if I go out, ninety percent of the time it'll be on a bike and ten percent in a car. And if I'm on a motorbike, I'm having fun. I'm relaxed, I'm more calm
and more confident on a bike than in a car. Now, if I put someone on the back of my motorbike who loves motorbikes, they're gonna be having a great time and producing all the biochemistry that reflects that great time, as you know better than me. And then if you put someone else on the back, we do the same thing on the same bike, and we go on the same trip with the same rider on the front, and they're terrified the exact same stimulus will produce the opposite effect.
Like that always fascinates me. Where I've had people who've come for a motorbike or I'd never done it, and then and we get back and they want to go again, like straight away, they want to go for another ride. That was the best thing I've ever done. And other people we're one kilometer down the road and they want to stop and get off and walk home. Right, you know me, absolutely, everybody's such an individual thing. Yeah. Yeah, Now, speaking of individual you were telling me before about this
amazing woman that you've written an article on. I find this. I heard about this, I think, but I don't really know any of the story. But do tell doctor Bill.
Yeah, the story has gotten press in years past because it's been developing for I guess the past ten or fifteen years. But like you said, I have an article that should be coming out sometime this week. The link to it will be up at my website, author Bill Sullivan dot com when it's published if people want to read more. So we're kind of giving folks a little
sneak preview. But I was really drawn to this story because it's just a fascinating aspect of you know, like you said, Craig, some of the differences that we all have. So there's a woman out there who was born seventy five years ago who can smell Parkinson's disease. She can smell this disease on Parkinson's patience. Now there's a really fascinating story behind this. You know, how did she know
that she was smelling Parkinson's disease? And is there a way that science and medicine can capitalize on this very strange and unique ability. So that's basically what I've been researching to write this article. I just became engrossed with it because you know, as you know, in my book Pleased to Meet Me, I wrote about the differences that people have in smell and taste, and most of that is genetic in origin. And there are people out there
who are hype sensitive to smelling. And this can actually be a really bad thing because not only do they are not only are they hyper sensitive to smelling like chocolate chip cookies, but they're hyper sensitive to smelling trash and then bad odors. So the condition is very rare and it's called hyperosmia, and it's a real heightened sense of smell, and we're not talking about specific sense. We're talking like across the board. They smell everything much more intently.
And this is probably genetic related to the number and type of all factory receptors that line the nasal cavity. But you know, it's not completely understood, but that's the most probable explanation. So you know, being able to smell these odors is a real interesting phenomenon. And you probably heard stories about animals being able to sniff out disease in people. There are well documented reports of certain dogs being able to sniff out cancer. They can sniff out diabetes.
I think rats or maybe dogs too, are able to sniff out tuberculosis. And we really don't know what the causative agent, what the mechanism is behind all this phenomenon, but apparently people with certain diseases their body odor changes,
and that's the black box. We don't know exactly how that happens, but the bottom line is their body odor changes, and an animal or even a person with hyperosmia can detect the differences in the chemical composition of their body odor that normal people like me and you with a normal sense of smell, it just doesn't cross our radar. So that's what this woman joy film can do. So let me tell you a little bit about how she
discovered this ability. She first she first realized that she had the ability to smell better than other people very early on in life.
You know, she was a.
Young girl and she would complain about how people smelled even though they've smelled perfectly fine to everybody else. So her mother had to take her aside and said, you know, we have this trait that runs in our family. You know, more evidence that it's genetic, because it's hereditary that makes us super smellers. We can detect odors that most people can't. So you know, she had to be taught as a
small girl. You know, even though someone might smell bad to you, don't say anything, you know, stuff like that. But like you know, God lover her. She went on to become a nurse. And if I don't know, I know, if I had a super sens sensitive OS, I would not want to go be a nurse because the smells of a hospital for someone who can smell like that aren't always going to be pleasant. And in fact, they were going to be pretty rotten most of the time.
But what she noticed as she was a nurse was that when she was around people with different diseases, they smell different to her. Okay, they smell different than normal people, and different diseases produced different sense. And she really didn't say anything, just kind of dismissed it as this unusual quirk, didn't think much of it. Nevertheless, she married a doctor. His name was Less and when he turned thirty one,
Joy noticed that he started smelling differently. Okay, and I'm going to read you the sentence that she said, his lovely male musk smell, which I guess is what most males smell like. Okay, we got this musky, manly scent, right, his lovely male musk smell. Had got this overpowering, sort of nasty yeast smell. Wow, which I guess would have been like bad bread or bad dough or something like that would have been unpleasant. Yeah, and she just kind of lived with it, you know. His body odor changed.
Really didn't know why, and she really, I guess, didn't think much of it in way of disease. She didn't think it was something alarming, but he definitely smelled different than other people, and he smelled different than when they first met and got married. So it turns out when he turned forty five, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
So what this was signaling to her, what we know she connected the dots here, was that she was smelling Parkinson's disease more than ten years before he developed the first visible symptoms. So, for those who don't know, Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenitive degenerative disorder, and in the US it affects about one million people, so it's pretty sizable
in terms of a neurodegenerative disorder. I think it's only second to Alzheimer's with respect to the number of people who are afflicted, and I think the number grows up to ten million when you go worldwide. So very significant disease, and there's no cure for it. You can slow it down and earlier diagnosis is crucial, but there's no cure. Unfortunately,
it's a poorly understood disease. We don't understand why these dopaminergic neurons are dying in Parkinson's patience, but as they do die, they lose control of their motor skills, they develop tremors, and as the disease progresses, they actually have virtually no control over bodily movements. They have difficulties swallowing, which is one of the common causes of death of Parkinson's patience is when food and lung food and fluids
enter the lungs because they can't swallow properly. They die from falls because they have lost their coordination, and there's cardiovascular issues related to some of the nervous system disorders that is associated with Parkinson's. So really nasty disease, and unfortunately her husband developed it, but it did allow her to connect the dots that that yeasty smell that she noticed was actually this Parkinson's and you know, she smelled
it long before he first exhibited any symptoms. Now, being a doctor, Less figured that it was really important that they contact a scientist or a researcher with this observation, because he suspected, as Joy did, that they may be able to study Joy's unusual sense of smell and do something beneficial for Parkinson's patience. So they started going to a lot of Parkinson's support group's charities, and Joy noticed that all the people with Parkinson's smelled like her husband did.
They did not smell like a normal person.
That is, that is, I would not want to make Joy nervy.
That well, yeah, that brings up a really interesting philosophical conundrum, doesn't it. If you had this superpower and you smelled someone who wasn't trembling, and you suspected they were going to get Parkinson's, should you tell them good question. Yeah, that's that's an interesting tangent. You know, I didn't think about that. So So anyway, at one of these public lectures in in twenty twelve, they met a scientist who
was giving a talk on Parkinson's. And after a little bit of convincing, because at first he was like, get out of here. You can't smell Parkinson's. That's ridiculous. But after a little convincing, you know, arguing that hey, animals can smell disease. Humans are animals. You know, this shouldn't be dismissed too lightly. So to his credit, this doctor til Kunath actually came around and said, all right, well
let's put it to the test, okay. So he designed this experiment and basically what they did was they got like several people who had Parkinson's and several people who did not. Those who didn't have Parkinson's would be the so called control group. Yeah, and he had them wear T shirts for like a day, and then he gave Joy these T shirts, but she didn't know who was wearing which one. That was her job just to try to assign it. Yeah, it's a really good experimental design,
very easy to do, very inexpensive. So Joy got every single one of them right except one. So she correctly identified all the T shirts that the Parkinson's patience were wearing. But there was one in the control group, you know, someone who didn't have Parkinson's, and she said, this shirt smells like Parkinson's. Lo and behold, one year later, that guy got Parkinson's.
That is bloody amazing.
Isn't that insane? Yeah, it's just mind blowing.
And so so initially they would have gone, well, look it's you're pretty accurate. You're not completely accurate, but and isn't it isn't it funny that? Wow? Okay, yep, okay, god.
Yeah, I mean I would have been impressed with like ninety percent accuracy. So what you missed one? You know, that's probably a flu. But then you know, a year later, this poor man develops Parkinson's. So she was right all along and it's further evidence that she's predicting. Her nose
can predict this disease long before visible symptoms appear. So that was just like her husband less, you know, So what this really excited the scientist, you know, this experiment was really paradigm shifting, and he got another investigator involved, Perdita Baron, and all this was taking place in the UK universities in the UK because she was Scottish, and they again pulled her into the lab and basically what they wanted to do was use her nose as like
a diagnostic tool to maybe help them develop a new test for Parkinson's disease that anyone can take, even people who don't have Parkinson's, right, Yeah, so what they were doing, you know, basically, Joy told them the smell of Parkinson's is strongest on the forehead and kind of on the back neck. That's where she could smell it the most, and that means, you know, the scent is coming from
not just body odor, but something even more specific. It's a substance called sebum, and this is an oily substance that glands in our hair follicles secrete onto our skin and it forms like this waxy barrier on our skin. It's protective. So these subacious glands in the hair follicles, the sebum that they're secreting must be changing. So the
rest of this is pretty straightforward science. The researchers can just take a swab and you know, running across the forehead of someone with Parkinson's and someone without, and put the material into what we call a mass spectrometer. This is basically going to tell you what chemicals are in that substance. Yeah, and then you do enough patients, you know, you do enough people with Parkinson's, enough without, you start to get statistically significant results pointing towards molecules that are
specific to Parkinson's patients and they lo and behold. Like in twenty nineteen they published a paper about two or three of these molecules are highly enriched in people with Parkinson's, And now instead of using Joy's nose, they can develop a very simple diagnostic kit. Okay, something you can do the swab, put it into a little test tube, you know, and after a while you can see if they have those molecules or not. So that's where they are with
this technology. These molecules are so called biomarkers for Parkinson's now, and anyone who exhibits an enrichment of these Parkinson's biomarkers, whether they're trembling yet or not, they're probably going to develop Parkinson's.
That is, I mean, that is really cool interesting science. I mean that is, that is like the intersection of
for me, entertainment and curiosity and awesome research. I wonder, like when you think about, like you and me looking at somebody with all the physical, obvious, overt neuromuscular symptoms to shaking whatever of Parkinson's, Like you and I could look at twenty people in a room, ten who have got Parkinson's, ten who haven't, and obviously we goll what's very apparent, right, But for her it's probably just as clear, you know, through that like, because she didn't get it
wrong at all. So it's funny that that is such a unique skill. And I wonder skill ability whatever I wonder. So let's say that we know, you know, like she smelled it at thirty one, when her husband was thirty one, and he was diagnosed at forty five. That's fourteen years. I mean that seems mind blowing. So let's say that we know doctor Bill, maybe a decade before somebody's going to get symptoms, we know that in advance, Then how does that advance knowledge serve us?
Right? And that's a great question. So, like I said, there's no cure for Parkinson's, but there are medications that Parkinson's patients can take that slow the progression of disease. And the sooner they get on these drugs, basically el dopa, they replenish the dopamine that Parkinson's patients are losing. So if you can restore that earlier on, you can probably slow the progression of the disease even more and extend the life of Parkinson's patients and extend their quality of life.
You know, in theory, the earlier you start treatment, the later the tremors will start to appear. So it could be a real breakthrough. Given that we don't have a cure. This is the best we can currently do. If we can use this diagnostic test and just like incorporate it into everyone's annual physical and if it turns out positive, to start people on these drugs, you may be able to delay the onset of Parkinson's symptoms, thereby increasing the quality of life.
Yeah, that's incredible. Yes, I just purely coincidentally. I need to find that. I've got it somewhere in my phone. This is not great for a pluck, but somebody sent me a reel, you know, an Instagram reel of a guy who I'm pretty sure it was Parkinson's And he was sitting in looked like a consulting room with the doctor and they were looking and very very very extreme shaking, and he asked him to pick up a glass which was a plastic drink glass and it had nothing in it.
But he couldn't, you know, he couldn't even nearly hold it still. And he couldn't there was zero chance that if it was full of water that it wouldn't go everywhere and he wouldn't get any and he'd get any of his mouth right, And then they had this I think it was like some deep brain stimulation thing where they turned they adjusted it and his I'll find it to you and send it to you in WhatsApp because I'm massacring this. But the tremors went away. Have you heard of that?
I have not. I mean I've heard of brain stimulation being used as a treatment for a variety of neurological disorders, so I guess it's not terribly outside the realm of possibility. Yeah, but yeah, they must be stimulating the brain or a different section of the brain to increase dopamine. Because when dopamine, I mean, that's basically mimicking the same effect that el dopa would if doctors are prescribing that as a treatment.
So I'm assuming it would achieve basically the same effect because you can you know, no one posts the real of this, I suppose, But when a trembling Parkinson's disease patients take their el dopa, you know, in a short amount of time, those tremors are going to be gradually reduced, Yes, you know, in early Parkinson's, to the point where they're not even noticeable by most people. That's how good el dopa is. The problem is Parkinson's patients develop a little
bit of resistance to that drug. You know, They're body starts to tolerate it, and they need more and more of it. And when you get to excessive levels, el dopa starts to have other effects on the body. It increases risk taking behavior, it lowers inhibitions. It can have some adverse effects that are almost just as bad as Parkinson's itself. So that's why we really do need a cure.
But that's where Joy can also be helpful. Now that these scientists have isolated some of the molecules that Parkinson's patients are increasing, Yes, we can kind of reverse engineer the disease, right. We can try to apply science to figure out why are Parkinson's patients increasing these chemicals, and if we stop that process with another type of drug, we might have a new treatment for Parkinson's.
It's incredible. I wonder how many I wonder how many other special abilities like that we're unaware of in other people who have certain like I know it's very rare, but in a world of billion people, I'm sure there's a lot of I'm sure there's at least another one hundred Joys or two or three or four hundred or thousand Joys who can smell in inverted commas or potentially smell other diseases.
No, you're right, And when I was researching this story, I came across that very thing, because as soon as Joy went public with her story, several other people wrote to the newspapers or the TV station saying Hey, I have this ability too, and I've noticed that my diabetic mother smells really funny, so you're absolutely right. There may be other people out there. And Joy herself, working as a nurse, has gone on record saying that folks with diabetes, Alzheimer's,
tuberculosis all have a distinct odor about them. So this this might just be the beginning, Craig Parkinson's just might be the gateway that allows further diagnostic tests based on Joy's ability or other people with her supercharge smelling abilities to develop new tests for diabetes, Alzheimer's and maybe infectious diseases as well.
Such a bloody, fascinating story, doc, So so we are what are we now? It's Monday now. I think this is going to be maybe tomorrow, which will be either tomorrow, Tuesday the twenty second, or Wednesday the twenty third. This will go live in Australia anyway. So when is the article coming out and how can people access it?
It'll come out sometime this week. I don't know the exact date because I probably still have some editorial changes that I will be required to make, yep, but it'll come out this week and people can go to my website, Author Bill Sullivan dot com. You can read this article when it comes out, and you know, a whole bunch more than I've written over the years.
And of course everyone doctor Bill's book is pleased to meet me jeans, germs, and the curious forces that make us who we are. He's an award winning professor at the Indiana University of Medicine, where he studies genetics and infectious diseases and appears once a fortnite or month or is it fortnightly or monthly? Monthly?
Fortnitely we do monthly monthly.
Lucky us. Thanks for doing it.
I don't know if you can handle more than that.
Are you sick of it yet?
No, not at all. Like I said before, I always enjoy coming on your programs. It's a delay to talk about science. You have very insightful questions, and I love the audience feedback we get on Facebook and Instagram.
Yeah, one hundred percent. So and to that everyone, if you've got we should do a Q and I. We've spoken about it, but we haven't done it, but we should do a Q and I episode. Your questions listener questions for Doctor Bill why don't you give people some context to that? So if people did want to ask you questions, what's kind of the areas that you would be most not comfortable with? But I guess, like, what's what kind of questions? What areas should they be asking them in or relative to?
Well, basically anything about biology. You know, I'm really a student of the human body. I love to learn what makes it tick. That overlaps a lot with psychology as well, and that basically is my book, as you mentioned, So anything that's related to what makes human beings work, why we do the things we do. I can dress that from a genetics standpoint, epigenetics, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, and of course my background and day to day work
is an infectious disease. Love to answer questions about that as well.
I've got a very specific question that's popped into mind as you're explaining all of that's completely a complete left turn to everything we've spoken about. So here's my last question. Don't roll your eyes everyone, I want the science behind this. So when I look at Donald Trump talking and I hear him and this is not a pro or an anti everyone, just this guy who clearly is hated and loved.
Some people hate him, some people love him. And there's been you know, there's praise, there's criticism, there's that guy seems to be I'm sure he isn't. But I've never me as a student of human behavior and psychology and you know, watching people who communicate for a living, and I've never seen anyone who's se seems to be less affected by the fucking avalanche of shit that he's always in the middle of. What are your thoughts, like he just it's I mean, water off a duck's back comes
to mind. What are your thoughts around how he just seems to deal with all that? I would have been dead five years ago just from the stress.
Oh you're asking how Trump deals with it?
Yes, Like how was he?
Like?
Yes, he's obviously he got voted in as president, so a lot of people must like him, and again no opinion about that. Also a lot of people somewhere between don't like him and despise him. Right, how does he deal with Like? Is that his genetics? Is he just wired that way?
Wow? Well that's like that's like the million dollar question, isn't it. I don't think it is controversial that Donald Trump is a nist. He only really cares about himself, right, I mean, you're the psychologist, and you've seen him speak and maybe you've read some of his social media posts. To me, it's abundantly clear he's a narcissist. So to answer your question, given that personality profile, I don't think
he cares what other people think about him. Yeah, So if you have that attitude, then I don't think you're going to have the stress that normal people feel, you know, when other people don't like them, if they receive criticism or negative feedback, even if it's presented in a constructive or fact based manner. If you're a narcissist, you just don't care. And to me, in terms of a leader, that's really dangerous to have.
Well, I think about this stat. I mean, the number of the alleged number of schship paths in our society varies on research whose research is between one and five percent. But even if we go absolute rock bottom one percent, that's one in one hundred. Well, that's give or take three and a half million sociopaths in America. That's a
lot of fucking people. And and in Australia that's you know, we're sitting at a whopping twenty seven million, so it's like a quarter of a million social paths based on the one percent number. I mean, yeah, it's a wonder we survive with those numbers.
Yeah, it is, it is, that's yeah, I never really appreciated the numbers to that extent.
Well, when I have even one percent of Americans, that is millions of people.
That's right, and you would think most crime might be committed by those folks, but in fact it's not unless we're just doing more about it. So and I have I have heard I'm preferred to as a as a psychopath and a sociopath. You're probably in a better position, given your expertise, to evaluate the validity of those remarks. But yeah, some of the things he says and does really do raise eyebrows on the for lack of the better word, the sanity. You know that, you know that
he must have. I mean, it's just boggles the mind that he is able to get away with some of the things he says and does, because when I was growing up, if any politician did such things, they would have been read out of Washington, d C. A long time ago. And there's just a disturbing level of acceptance and normalization right now that that could really damage the United States and maybe the world as well.
I remember, I remember when he was campaigning first time around, and all of that stuff came out about, like a recording of him talking about some very unsavory stuff about him and a woman, right, And he was talking and the stuff that he said was fucking terrible. And I heard that. I heard the recording and I went, oh, well, there's his political career. It's like, well, he had a good go at it, I mean, but this is out now, I mean, and things come out that are nowhere near
as bad as that, that have destroyed many careers. But he was literally saying like some very very vulgar, very inappropriate, very horrible shit, right, And I heard it, and I went ah, because I was kind of curious about what would happen. I went, oh, well, now we know it's never going to get across the line. And he's done. And then five minutes later his presidence, I'm like, what, how on earth did that stuff not totally won derail
his campaign and his endeavors. And two like, obviously I wouldn't do that or say that, but if that came out about me. I had have done that or said that, I would have just like pulled him my head in and gone off into the mist. You know.
Yeah, well, you raise a good point. If he was in any other profession, Okay, in a business or a school, or the things he says and does would have gotten him fired in a heartbeat. But for some reason, in politics he's cheered on. And you know, fifty two percent of Americans are scratching their head and saying, what is going on here? It's like we've lost We've taken leave of our senses. This is a serial abuser. Okay, he's obviously a bully, he's a revenge seeker. He's terrible to women,
he's terrible to minorities. He's cheated on all three of his wives. Okay, and he's a convicted felon twice, impeached. I just you know what more can happen?
Right?
I mean? But he literally said himself that he could murder someone in cold blood and he would get away with it. Yeah, that's not inaccurate.
Wow, he in his own way, he is.
You know, he should get an honorary PhD in psychology. I think he really knows how to mess with people's minds, and he's used that to his advantage as a narcissist to try to create this Well, he's trying to like rewrite history now, you know, with calling the twenty twenty election of fraud. And you know what he's done with our our our healthcare pages, our medicine pages, and our
science foundations is just absurd. I mean, he is like trying to rewrite history as he sees it, you know, is in his worldview, and his worldview does not always align with objective reality. And this is what scares me to death, Greg, because people are buying what he says, you know, lock stock and barrel. They will not question it.
It's like a cult.
And if you don't question what one person is telling you, you don't have a democracy anymore. You have a dictatorship.
And the interesting thing, yeah, I agree with you. And the interesting thing is that so by the way, you know, schiopaths, sockerpath they're not the same thing, but they get kind of used interchangeably. But obviously a sociopaths and narcissists can
be the one human, right. But the thing about a lot of sociopaths slash nists is that they are often charismatic, charming, have a high ich you obviously incredibly manipulative, and they don't always initially seem like you know, over time people kind of find out, but initially like and I've I've met some people in my life where I initially was enamored. I'm like, oh my god, this person's amazing, and then the year or two or three, lady, you're like I was, Yeah,
they are. They're charming, they're funny, they can they've got a great vocabulary, they can read the room, they can build rapport and can they can do all of these things that make it seem like they're an awesome human. But it's all strategic and it's all self serving.
Yeah, it's very disappointing when when you see that late.
You know, hey, mate, it's been great once again, everybody. Doctor Bill's book is called Please to Meet Me Jeans, Germs and the Curious Forces that make us who we are. Also, his article is going to be out this week, so have a read of that. We'll say goodbye off air, but for now, thanks mate, I appreciate you as always.
Hey, it's always a pleasure to come on and chat with you.
Craig, Thanks buddy,